Has the Nation Lost Its Faith? Divisions and the Future of the Right

Welcome once again to the American Mind podcast. I'm your host, Spencer Clavin, Associate Editor of the Claremont Review of Books. I am joined this week, as always, by publisher and president Ryan Williams, as well as editor head honcho, Mike Sabo, newly, newly anointed. We are also joined, and this is a first for the TAM podcast, by Eric Metaxas. He's the author of the new book. Revolution, the birth of the greatest nation in the history of the world, which I'm holding up now in front of the camera. If you can see me, if you're watching, and he's also the founder, of course, and host of Socrates in the City, the beloved interview show and podcast series. So many of our listeners, I'm sure, will be familiar, Eric, with your work. We're very glad to have you. This is a book commemorating the 250 years of the country, which is something we've been discussing, of course, quite a bit here on the American Mind podcast. Claremont's highly The principles of the revolution and with their endurance over these centuries. We're also at a momentous time because we're recording right after a pretty striking set of midterm elections, and I wonder maybe if we can just begin by hearing from you a little bit about how you're feeling in the wake of last Tuesday, what your assessment is of the current, the up-to-the-minute state of the country before we start talking a little bit about our longer history. Well, thank you for having me, first of all. And I'm always prepared to say something about anything. So with regards to the midterms, there's a lot to be said about how we could get to a place in America where people could seemingly vote or not vote and open the door to... The destruction of the nation. In other words, you know, when when when you have people like John Adams saying that we need a virtuous and moral populace or virtuous and religious. But what they were talking about is if we don't have enough people who actually care about the right things, if you're just caring about your pocketbook. That's not going to work. You can't have liberty that way. So if you're upset about gas prices to the point where you are going to open the door for communism or Islam or whatever it is, you're going to have problems. In other words, you need a citizenry that is awake to the fragility of liberty, to the cost of it, to what is necessary. I think that's part of what we just saw. And I guess it is why I wrote the book on the American Revolution, because it's been my My discernment. That in my lifetime, we have really ceased to know. What it is that liberty actually is, how we get liberty, how we got liberty 250 years ago. And as that drifts away, as you take it for granted, you open the door to other ideologies that will very, very aggressively push out liberty and are the enemies of liberty. And I think we've been so blessed in this country that we've kind of thought, well, you know, it'll last forever. You know, what can change? I think we've come to a point where you are running on fumes and at some point, you know, the car conks out. So I kind of think this midterm, if anything, should be a loud wake up call that we can lose liberty. I mean, I've been saying this for years, but this was a particularly dramatic example of it, Because when you're bringing in people that are openly talking about Sharia law or, you know, wink, wink. This is a this is a new day in a sense. And so I if there's any silver lining kind of like with the horrors of 2020 and the Biden pseudo presidency, it is that some people. who can be awakened will finally wake up and say, you know what? Honestly, I didn't see it. I had no idea. Okay, you know, where do I sign up for doing something about preserving liberty if it's not too late? I'm interested to hear you say that it's within your lifetime, this sense of liberty or this, shall we say, to use kind of an old-fashioned term, jealousy of American liberties has dissipated. Is there a particular moment when you think that? What happened? Has it been a gradual shift? I mean, what do you attribute, I guess, this amnesia? Well, I mean, I think it's just like anything else. You know, there are moments we can point to. I mean, something happened in the 60s. You know, you could point to Watergate, Vietnam, kind of a jaundiced view of America. Suddenly, you know, celebrating America was not the thing to do. The thing to do was to criticize America. Anytime anybody brings up George Washington, suddenly the thing to do is to say, uh-uh, he was a slave owner. This kind of stuff became fashionable. And then, of course, it takes decades to work its way. You know, it's the trickle-down theory of culture that some people, it won't affect them, but it sort of makes its way into the drinking water. And I. And I think that, I mean, to me, part of the reason I wrote the book Revolution is I thought, this is our 250th. Birthday. Birthday is a time to celebrate. But the left in America, and again, this goes back decades, they ceased to feel comfortable celebrating. They think, well, we can't celebrate too much. We have a lot to be ashamed of. And to me, that's really sick. In other words, it's one thing, it's healthy to say, this is what we got wrong. This is what needs fixing. Have we abolished slavery? Oh, yeah, we did that. Good, because that's a bad thing. We figured that out. Racism is bad. Like, we figured some stuff out. Did we fix it? Are we fixing it? But the left, and again, this is just classic cultural Marxism. They have an ideology that says we'll we'll never do enough to celebrate anything. We have to writhe with guilt. That's the only proper posture is to be ashamed of whatever we've achieved, to know that we've achieved it on the backs of. Whatever group, it's not really ours. In other words, that narrative takes decades to work its way into the system, you know, and there's certain places where you see it more than in other places, but it's taken decades to where you get to a place 250 years where you say we want to celebrate. I mean, I'm old enough to remember the bicentennial was wonderfully celebratory. And I think that the marker for me, I was always I was practically done with writing my book when it happened. PBS and Ken Burns put out a 12-hour documentary on the revolution, so ostensibly doing what I hope to do in my book, to tell the whole story, this epic narrative. And in 12 hours, they managed to make it sound like, yeah, we can't really celebrate. America. And I thought to myself, that's the definition of PBS, the definition of the left. Even on your 250th birthday, they can't celebrate. And I say, it's kind of like if you have an 11-year-old girl, it's her birthday. You say, we're going to bring you all your friends and relatives, and we're going to tell you all the stuff that we don't like about you and that you really need to work on because you've got problems. Anybody would know to do that on a birthday. That would be deeply sick. That would be like child abuse and insane. But that's sort of the posture we've adopted in America. And it really has gotten to a point where. It's preposterous. I mean, it's an extraordinary thing that we have to say, excuse me, we have liberty in America. We have accomplished great things. We actually, again, I'm pretty sure, maybe I'm correct me if I'm wrong. I think we abolished slavery. Was it 30 years ago? 40 years? Oh, no. Oh, no. It was like 150 years. It's so crazy that the left in America, and we know that they own the institutions, right? They are stuck on this mode. There's something so sick about it that I find it really fascinating that it's worked its way into everything, pretty much. I just wanted to write a book that tells the straight story. It's not just a pure celebration, but when you tell the story, it's kind of like if you watch the film Rocky, you don't leave the theater thinking, so who was the good guy? You know, like, you know, like this was an amazing, you know, the people who should not have won won against all odds. It's an amazing story. That's kind of the natural, healthy way, you know, you process a story like the birth of the United States of America. So I kind of thought that was my assignment that I set for myself. I hope I accomplished it. I think I did. But that's all I really wanted to do was tell the actual story without, you know. Feeling like in every sentence, I need to apologize for the first part of the sentence. Well, thank you, Eric, for being here. And you focused on, obviously, the things, the 1619ization, if I can come up with a better word of what the left has obviously wrought in our institutions, educational and otherwise. Could you talk about, you know, going back to, you know, this being our super centennial, I think that's the phrase that you came up with. I think President Trump actually himself does use. What is the cornerstone of the American regime? What are we celebrating? What are the key things that all Americans need to know that they say maybe do not know currently about their country? Well, thank you for that question, because that's kind of the point is that we really have ceased to understand what it is that we have. We think that self-government is normal. It is not normal. It is a wild, crazy idea in history that people could govern themselves. And at the time. In 1776, they understood this. I mean, Thomas Paine, you know, there was never people who governed themselves without a king. What would that look like? You know, we would see. One version of it in 1789 in the French Revolution, it would look like a freaking bloodbath, like a proto-Bolshevik nightmare of blood and violence, you know, that ends in trading a king for a dictator emperor. It doesn't work. I mean, this is not the natural order of things that people suddenly govern themselves. Man is fallen and it hadn't worked. Just to think that 250 years ago. Things happened in such a way that it was possible, perhaps, to try to do this. We need to see the wildness of it. We need to see that it ought not to have happened. This doesn't naturally happen. But I think there's this kind of secular narrative like, oh, it was inevitable. Basically, if you believe in evolution, you believe, oh, we're always evolving towards something better. I think that's nonsense. And I think that what happened in 1776 is just a wild moment in the history of the world. And we've ceased to see the wildness of it. We've ceased to see. The rarity, what series of events would happen to allow a group of men at that time to think, we think we could actually govern ourselves without a king. I mean, it really is just. A glorious moment in the history of the world, and I go so far as to say clearly that the men of the revolution understood what they were really doing was trying to bring about a biblical model of government. They said that we think that if we could just start from scratch, this is God's idea that people would govern themselves, but we've lost the radical sense of it, of what was accomplished. Eric, I wanted to highlight maybe an underappreciated aspect of the revolutionary era that you bring to light in the book, and it's been commented on some of the reviews and interviews you've done already, but I just want to bring it to our audience, which is, maybe I can put it this way for our modern audience, especially just after this midterm, and a bunch of previous midterms. We have this... This view both left and right of a sclerotic establishment and a rejection of it. And I think it's present in your book and your discussion about the disparity culturally and maybe even religiously between the revolutionary founders and the people who... chose those founders as their leaders in the colonies versus what you describe as a kind of decadent ruling class, decadent colonial ruling class in Great Britain. Could you just tease that out a little bit? I think it's an underappreciated fact, cultural phenomenon that's present at the founding. Yeah. And as happens with most of my books, I didn't know this going in. I mean, I go into writing many of my books with grand ignorance. I just know enough that it's worth I'm writing a book and doing the research. But then when I do the research, I'm often astonished at what I discover. And I have to say that I don't want to be astonished. You know, I just want to tell the story. I don't want to find anything new. I'm not a scholar that feels like I have to have some new angle on it. But in fact, when I told people that I'm writing a book on the revolution, they all said, what's your angle? What's your angle? I said, I have no angle. I simply want to tell the story. Uh, I'm a popular writer. I think I can tell a story in a way that's compelling that people actually want to read the book. Um, so I'm not looking for any new angles, but I just want to tell the story. And to me that itself is an angle in a sense, it's, it's radical to simply tell the story without trying to make a point because I think it's a beautiful story. And in some ways an unknown story, but in the, in the process of doing the research over and over and over again, I bumped into what you're mentioning. And I thought, how have I never seen I've seen this before that The culture of the 13 colonies was dramatically Bible-saturated. This was as Christian a culture as anything you could ever see. I mean, these people, obviously, it's because of the Reformation. They leave Europe because they're feeling, many of them, That they're being persecuted. They were, in fact, being horribly persecuted. So suddenly there's this continent where they can escape to 3,000 miles away. So many of them go to that continent. We can govern ourselves. We can be left alone. We can worship God according to the Bible, according to whatever we see fit. So you have this Reformation culture, this Puritan culture, especially in New England, and they're left alone. And then in the 18th century, you have the Great Awakening with George Whitefield preaching up and down the 13 colonies. So it is it is vibrantly Christian. And on the other side, you've got most of the folks in British elite culture in Parliament. He's extraordinarily decadent. I mean, when I noticed this, I think I noticed the first time I noticed this disparity was when, you know, everywhere you look about George Washington, see George Washington, he's this noble figure. Everyone comments on he's this man of tremendous virtue that you almost feel, you know, you see him in the room and you feel like, you know, I better stand up straight or he was. A proponent of public virtue, that his officers would need to conduct themselves in a certain way. And he was just, you know, a model of that. His counterpart on the British side, General Howe. Not only did he have a mistress during the whole time that he is in America, but he is known by everyone to have a mistress. In other words, the cultural mores of elite British culture at that time were that, well, of course he has a mistress. We're just like, we're not that different from the French. Yes, we're decadent. And we... It was a whole culture that was so dramatically different from the Puritan culture of New England or the Bible-saturated culture of the Thirteenth Colonies that it's actually shocking. And then you notice, too, that not only... Did the British not share the faith of many in the 13 colonies, but they openly mocked it? They called them the Bible-faced Yankees. They called Samuel Adams the psalm singer. They mocked it. In other words, they thought these are just a bunch of religious hypocrites where they're talking about your liberties come from God. Shut up and pay your tax. Parliament has the authority. I mean, it really was. A cultural divide that everywhere I looked, I saw more examples of it. And one dramatic example of it is in the way they conducted the war. You have the the Americans starting with George Washington and, of course, John Adams being really clear and Samuel Adams that. They believed in covenant theology. In other words, if we want God to be with us in this sacred cause, because they believed it was a sacred cause, we have to honor God in asking him to guide us and lead us and in how we behave. And so Washington, the first order to the Continental Army is to his officers that I don't want the men cursing, profane swearing and cursing. drinking, and they must attend divine services on Sunday. Why? Because we have to earn the smiles of providence on our efforts. In other words, he actually believed, and this is not how deists talk, that if we want to win, this is God's idea, so we have to honor God in how we fight. The British had as dramatically different a view as you can have. They basically thought, hey, We got the cards. We've got the biggest army, the biggest navy. We will crush you like cockroaches. We're not worried about what God thinks. We just know we're right, and we will crush you. But more to the point, they were sadistic and cruel. They had the kind of worldview. Not that we're going to treat our enemies with dignity, which is what Washington and Adams and others said. We're going to treat our prisoners with dignity because we believe they're created in God's image. So we don't play that sadistic, cruel game. The British, and again, I hadn't seen this before, that Americans would surrender and they would bayonet them to death. It's like the Japanese or the Nazis in World War II, a sadistic, cruel, horrifying. way of conducting war. Again, that's just an example. But I saw it over and over and over again. And I kept thinking, how come I've not seen this before, that the British sort of delighted in their decadence and their immorality. It's sort of how they flew, culturally speaking. And I guess I would sum it up by saying it's kind of like Manhattan elites or Hollywood elites versus, you know, a homeschooling community in Oklahoma. The cultural gap It staggered me. It actually staggered me. And I began to see it almost everywhere. So it's kind of crazy that I hadn't known this before. I hadn't seen this before. So I don't make it the whole point of the book, but it's in there. Yeah, this contrast between the devout colonists and the libertine European continental Brits is really interesting. It kind of runs through the story, and it raises a question. That I think a lot of people ask nowadays about the revolution, which is the question of creed and culture, right? When Mike asked kind of what's the foundation of the American regime, you mentioned self-government. This is very much a kind of creedal version of the story that it's about our particular structure, form of government, our kind of absolute or universal ideas about the rights of man. But there's also a lot in here, and you mentioned the John Adams quote about moral and religious people. There's a lot in here to do with the distinctive blend of, you know, sort of Western civilization in its new form on the American continent. What's your approach to this whole? kind of difficult question of, you know, is America, is it purely a set of ideas that you could write out and transport anywhere? Is it something that requires a particular kind of culture or even, you know, religious makeup? Well, look, we know it's not the color of your skin or your ethnicity. That's just garbage and nonsense. But of course, there are, there's this thing called culture. You know, if somebody comes here, my father came to this country in the 1950s He's from Greece. My mother came to this country in the 1950s from Germany. They wanted to adopt an American way of being. They didn't say, the heck with that. I'm going to do things the way we did it in the old country. In other words, they understood that there's something here. That I want. And it is part of the culture. It is part of because you might not even buy into the ideas, but you go along with the behavior because that's how the culture operates. Right. And, you know, I think that Americans are the good guys. Why are we the good guys? Well, some people don't know why they just know. But, well, we're the good guys. We don't do that dirty stuff that other people do and we shouldn't do it. They're not going to say, well, because we have, you know. covenant theology. We believe God won't bless us if we don't do it. They just know that's kind of how we operate. So culture, of course, is very important. And I think that any human being can buy into a set of ideas and so on and so forth, but culture comes into it. And so it's a simple fact that some people, if you're coming over from a certain country where they don't do things that Will you enter a culture that overwhelms? Your default and that kind of forces you to behave in that way, or will you be able to maintain some of these, you know, negative ways of operating, you know, and so I think that that's that's kind of the key is you have to have, you know, enough ballast in a sense so that, you know, whoever comes along there, they're kind of going to adopt the mores and the ways of being. But it really... You know, getting back to my book, I was kind of astonished at how Christian the culture was, especially in New England, which drove the whole thing. I mean, you know, the war was not, you know, started or the revolution didn't start in South Carolina. I mean, it really begins in Puritan New England. And I had never seen it so clearly. I mean, it kind of amazed me how central that was, how inescapably central it is. One aspect of Christian culture that I keep going back to is the place of preachers giving election sermons, giving sermons about going against the British. I mean, they were obviously a huge factor in this. And one particular chapter of the Bible I'm thinking of is Romans 13, talking at least on the surface about submitting to governing authorities. God put these people over you. How did they reconcile these things? Because they obviously had a place for... for liberty, for fighting back. How did they think about these things? What arguments did they make? Well, I mean, there's a famous sermon, and I quote this in my book. John Adams says at some point that there was a sermon preached in Boston in 1750 by Jonathan Mayhew on this issue, and he just lays it out. This is the biblical view. Forget about Romans 13, because Romans 13 Acts 17 is just one chapter in the Bible. You have... All kinds of examples about standing up to tyranny and that if somebody tells you to do something that is not consonant with your beliefs, you have an obligation not to do that thing. And so, you know, whether it's an example of bowing to a statue of Nebuchadnezzar, I mean, there's endless places in Scripture that make these things clear. So to pretend that Romans 13 kind of settles it is preposterous. But what's amazing to me is that so many preachers... I've had that understanding that they said, no, of course, tyranny, we're not going to bow to tyranny. I have a biblical obligation not to obey tyranny. I have an obligation to God. And they really did see God as their king, ultimately. And they said, the king, he's only the king, you know, because God has allowed him to be the king. We don't obey him like he's some dictator. Our rights come from God. And then the leap, oh, and the king's rights. also come from God. That is the great leveler that comes out of the scripture, but it comes from the pulpits. The pulpits, I mean, overwhelmingly, we're preaching, you know, rebellion, if you want to call it that, rebellion to tyranny, which is obedience to God. I mean, and it's so funny, too, because I think that you see it everywhere, but then people say, oh, but most of them, weren't they deists? Or, you know, what about Franklin? What about Jefferson? Jefferson and Franklin, each of them were asked... To come up with a seal, an image of the new nation. Franklin comes up with the image of Moses overseeing the parting of the Red Sea and Pharaoh's army drowning. That's Franklin. Jefferson comes up with the image of the Israelites in the Sinai wilderness following the pillar of fire and the cloud. These are the two least religious figures in the Continental Congress coming up with dramatically religious images to say, this is who we are. We've gotten rid of an earthly king, but we're following God as our king. It's the reprise of the Sinai covenant. We've been delivered from Pharaoh, and we're now on our own, but we're not strictly on our own. We're under God. That was really clear to everybody, including to Franklin, including Jefferson. We've lost that. And if you want to know how the men of the revolution believed it would be possible to govern yourselves without a king. And that's how they believed it was possible. And none of them would have believed that it could be possible in any other way. And if you needed proof, you just had to wait till the French Revolution comes along. You could say, yeah, that didn't succeed too dramatically for them. When they started killing the priests and nuns, maybe God needs to be involved, you know, in this somehow, somehow, let's figure it out. One last question before we let you go, Eric. You've mentioned a couple of times the things that the left in this country has done to undermine the- The revolutionary spirit and the ideals that emerge out of the revolution, obviously you're in good company when you talk about this. We're pretty much in agreement with you about it. Also, having sort of let go of this creed and culture that sustained the country, surely that's kind of an indictment, too, of us, of conservatives or those who would have wanted to sustain this. And I wonder what you think. We've gotten wrong, what we've lost, and what we need to recover to be more effective, I guess, advocates of the revolution. Well, thank you, Spencer. And I mean, in retrospect, I realized that is why I wrote this book, because I think we have simply forgotten the basics. You cannot have liberty without the God of the Bible. Now, you cannot legislate that people go to church. You can't legislate that people have certain theology. But everyone involved at the time, 250 years ago, understood this is how, if it can work. This is how it's going to work. They all got the memo that we're going to get rid of an earthly king and we're going to look to God as our king. You have Samuel Adams. He gives a speech to Congress the day before they signed the engrossed copy of the Declaration. So August 1st, 1776, outside Independence Hall. And in it, he says, we have restored the sovereign, capital S. He's making it explicit. We've got rid of an earthly king and we look to God as our king. It couldn't be clearer. Everywhere you look, they seem all to have this understanding. And I think to myself, even if we don't have this understanding, don't we have to intellectually be honest and understand they had that understanding? It's how liberty came into the world. That's how they saw it. We've ceased to teach that. And again, if somebody can come up with a more clever way of achieving liberty, good luck. But that's how they did it 250 years ago. I think most Americans used to know this, and I think it leads us into, you know, Thinking like, well, it's the free market, you know, if we only throw the free market, you know, in the direction of China, they'll all start wearing tricorn hats and behaving like Ben Franklin. And, you know, it's like, no, you have to have virtue. You have to have morality. Nobody could be more explicit than George Washington and his farewell address. And in many other places that this is central. So we can't legislate. Faith, but without this kind of faith, virtue and all this stuff goes out the window. So this is necessary, but it has to come freely. It used to be part of. American culture. And I think if we think that we can just get rid of that part, but we'll keep the free market or we'll keep, you know, everybody gets to vote or whatever, it eventually goes away. And I think that in these recent midterms, you know, you kind of see that it does not. There's no other way to achieve liberty. If you can if you can find it, you know, let me know. But according to all the folks in the revolution. This is central. This is absolutely central. And it's kind of amazing we've forgotten that. But I think that, you know, we don't have any time. To continue forgetting it, like now is the time, you know, for us to to to understand how it is that we have what we like. I mean, you like liberty. We like liberty. Great. How do you get liberty? Let's let's be honest about that. This is, I think, the missing piece. Well, the book is called Revolution, the Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World. It should be of great interest to many of our listeners, if not all, indeed. I'm sure you can get it wherever books are sold. Eric Metaxas, it's been a pleasure. Thanks for joining us. My privilege. Thank you. Well, from the relatively consoling contemplation of the past, we must turn once again to the somewhat hectic present. We talked last week with our initial responses to the midterms and the disastrous results for Republicans. Obviously, we're going to be... sifting through those results for some time, and there's going to be, it already is, a big ensuing conversation about who's to blame, what should happen on the right going forward. I've been watching recently Donald Trump's interview with Ross Douthat on 60 Minutes, which is worth paying attention to, I think. But another part of this is... Trump will be leaving the scene now. We've been eyeing this on the horizon for some time, but, you know, whether or not he goes out like a typical, quote-unquote, lame duck or not remains to be seen. But we do have the expected infighting and finger-pointing going on within the party, so it's worth, I think... Reviewing some of these different accounts that are now emerging, first and foremost, that of the vice president, because there was a remarkable tweet, a lengthy tweet that J.D. Vance put out giving his assessment based, he says, on conversations with pollsters and kind of internal data analysts and friends of his that study. Voter turnout and so on and so forth. So not just pulling things out of the air, but also departing in a pretty serious way from what one might expect Trump's point of view to be. We're told that Trump saw and approved. That's the reporting, at least, that he saw and approved this week before it went out. But it's certainly, I think, an attempt on Vance's part, if nothing else, to establish himself as distinctive within the MAGA movement, to carve out his... assessment, analysis, and route forward. His takeaway is kind of summed up in four points in the middle of this tweet. He says, first of all, something that I think we all kind of would agree with, although you guys tell me if you don't. He says that people did come out who voted for Trump in 2024. It's not like the Trump 2024 coalition didn't show up. It's that a lot lot of them voted for Democrats. In other words, this kind of middle normie. gang of new voters that Trump brought on were in no way secured as forever Republican voters and had been lost that by the last two years, something that happened in the last two years scared away or put off those independents and normies who came on for Trump in 2024. And here's what Vance says. Scared them off. Or here's the four things he says need to change to win them back. One, end the war. So he's putting this first and foremost in the Iran war, on the Iran war. Two, focus on the cost of living and inflation, which is obviously a related issue to the Iran war. Three, put America first. Um We can talk about what that might mean in the context of this tweet. But four, change our relationship to Israel. sorry. So I think that is a really interesting set of things. Notably, corruption is not on that list, something we did talk about last time. I mean, there are things missing from this account, which in most kind of mainstream accounts seem to be figuring prominently, including the president's own sort of financial dealings and his apparent kind of disregard for economic problems. There's also not a lot of tariff. stuff one way or another in here, unless that's part of Put America First. But it seems like Vance really wants this to be a referendum on... Foreign adventurism, Iran more specifically, but also more generally our relationship to the Middle East. Maybe I'm misreading him. Maybe you guys want to jump in here with other takes on it. But what did you make of Vance's assessment of the situation, both as a kind of analysis of what's going on and also as a strategic move for him looking toward 2028? He's in the, just in purely political terms, in the unenviable position of trying to distance himself from this blowout and its link to people's dissatisfaction with the current administration and his ambitions to run. For a subsequent administration, we should say that Vance, a couple weeks ago, floated the idea that he might not run. But clearly here, he's trying to keep his options open. It will be difficult for him, I think, and for anyone closely tied to this administration to make that case in 28. Not impossible, but it will handicap them going into that contest, I think. So this is part of that. I found it curious, you know, if you look at all the exit polling. You know, it seems to me that Vance is playing up a little more than it deserves, the pure status of the war and also the relationship with Israel. It seems to me, and to continue our theme from last week, I was struck, if you look at this midterm election, it is, Mike's going to bring up Jeff Anderson's piece in The American Mind, which sort of dissects all of this, so I'll leave most of that to Mike. But if you look at the The trade, the constant back and forth of trading of power, both in midterm elections and in presidential elections in this bigger era of the post-Cold War period, it's remarkable to me the extent to which there's a big, big and. juicy middle of American politics from center left to center right, and with a bunch of independents tossed in to boot, where ideology does not seem to play a huge role in how people vote. And so I think we can overread, and I worry that Vance is overreading, the centrality of Iran. It seems to me from the exit polls, first and foremost for people, where corruption and cost of living and the Iran war is mixed in with that because it exacerbated the cost of living question. It does not seem to me that a majority of midterm voters. To the extent that they rejected the president had as their sole focus, the Iran war, although the Iran war is not that popular. It's just not, it's in a third, fourth, third or fourth position at the front of people's minds rather than front and center. Now, all of which is to say, you know, these things are messy and exit polling is also messy and has always been messy. So He's not wrong to bring up the Iran war. It's certainly a prominent part of this whole story. But I think the slide for the president and his party and the dissatisfaction with what is now should be regarded as year six of—leave aside the interregnum of Biden, but a year six of a two Trump administrations. Thank The Iran war didn't help, but I think Thank you. In order to reverse course, and I'm speaking largely as a party and as a movement, and as any party and movement needs to do to court a significant number or enough voters in order to maintain you. the hold on the presidency on the GOP side of the ledger, it's going to have to be a much larger assessment than merely, if only we hadn't gone to war with Iran. Whether or not you think it was at the behest of Israel or not, or somewhat at the behest of Israel or not, there's a much wider argument and a much broader appeal to the median voter in America that I think has more to do with this. This fact of the last 30 or 40 years of American politics, which is neither of these major parties being able to close the deal with a solid and long-lasting governing majority, and that has a lot more to do with... Well, I shouldn't put it that way. Our conduct and failures in Middle Eastern foreign policy, especially on the Republican side, over 20 or 30 years or so, certainly plays a role. And the recalibration about our approach to foreign policy in general and the Middle East as a particular piece of that is certainly a big part of the shifting coalition on the right. But we should be careful not to overread. People's response in this midterm and putting Iran solely at the center of it, I think, misses a lot. I think there's a lot of wisdom there. I think, first of all, actually, this is something I meant to mention last week. I mean, exit polls, I think, are helpful. They can be, you know, good and kind of shining a spotlight on where current voters are. But I mean, they should not be read as some, you know, absolute. lock and absolutely showing what voters across America and a very accurate reading. I think they certainly show something, but they also shouldn't be everything, just like I think polls in general. Obviously, the polling in general was certainly better this time around than it has been in the past. So that certainly would help. But I would just kind of put that caution there. Yeah. I mean, the interesting thing about this is it, I agree. I think it's a bit too monocausal. I think I see what J.D.'s certainly trying to do here. He's trying to, you know, open the door to the people who were, say, just repelled at the administration overall with the podcaster class, with other people, people, you know, in Tucker Carlson's kind of orbit. You know, he knows that that's certainly a coalition that, you know, I don't know how sizable it is, but I think that's a coalition he wants to court. Theo Von, Joe Rogan, some of the podcasts that he went on, you know, in the pre kind of 2024 election blitz that he and Trump both did. So I think this is part of that. The thing to me that really signaled that it's probably really part of that was, you know, number four, change our relationship to Israel. We'll When you look at the electorate this time around, that is just not something that jumps out as even possibly a top 10 thing that voters are probably interested in. be And as Ryan mentioned, you know, Jeff Anderson today, right we published a very, very good piece analysis by him just looking at everything. And he basically argues that, you know, this is not, quote, remotely a full account of back. the Republicans disaster. And he's saying that really, actually, the number one stated concern of voters is government corruption. A majority of voters, 55 percent, said this was a crucial reason for their vote, with 90 percent saying it was either crucial or a major factor. Those 90% of voters went for their Democrats by 16 points. In comparison, about a third of voters, 34%, said the war in Iran was a crucial reason for their vote, with about three quarters, 74%. So again, still sizable, saying it was either crucial or a major factor. This puts the Iran war essentially on par with immigration enforcement as an influence on voters. So obviously, it had some role to play, clearly. Truly, but. It was not the only thing. And I think that you could see, you know, tectonic plates shifting against Trump, even before the Iran war, with the way the economy was going, inflation, housing prices, you know, gas prices, I think even a bit, you know, even before that, obviously, the war, I think, I think doubled them overall. But these are clearly much more major issues in our politics. That stem from, I think, much more long term problems. And I think that that's something that, you know, JD, whether it be him, whether it be, you know, Marco Rubio, which is to me, it's an interesting case because there's obviously been rumors that, you know, Marco Rubio is going to be exiting the administration soon. I think he's certainly going to have a difficult time, just as Vance would, to separate himself from the administration's foreign policy, obviously being Secretary of State. Ron DeSantis has come out in an interesting kind of, you know. Just straightforward, kind of almost ready-made for the podcast views of a lot of things. So that'll be interesting to see, you know, if he enters the ring. Chris Christie is talking about it as well. That one, I don't think he's really going to be going anywhere. But, you know, this is certainly shaping up and certainly, you know, things are being said with the view clearly to 2028. There's no doubt about it. Yeah, it does sort of seem like the Vance take is a classic example of everything that has happened confirms my priors, which inherently makes me suspicious. Besides everything you guys have mentioned about the fact that it just doesn't seem as if, I mean, I'd like to know what polling Vance is looking at, because this is just not what even the exit polls seem to me to be saying. And of course, there is complexity there. And it's possible there are vibes-based or anecdotal things going on in the air that aren't reflected in the numbers, et cetera. But actually, I think it's a mistake to trust too much in that. And I wonder if that's part of what's happening with Vance, that it's really easy to get a strong signal from your own personal entourage that, ah man, the real thing that people care about is X. And like Vance, I think is surrounded by people who are very intensely passionate about this idea that it's the Iran war, it's the relationship with Israel. I think that's out of touch. I think that's disconnected from what people are actually talking about. And I think Vance maybe also doesn't want to talk about some of the things that the election is also about. And it speaks speaks to what I was discussing. We were all kind of talking about this last. week that there are going to be hard pills for all of us to swallow in this information. I think we can reasonably assume that unless we're feeling uncomfortable with our own selves, we're not reading this election right, because it's such a stirring and across the board loss that it touches on everything that has been going on in the last two years. If it just, it seems like this Vance assessment boils down to, I've been right about everything all along and the people who support me are the right side of the party. And I just, I don't think that that's a fair reading of what, or a plausible reading of what has happened in these elections. It may be a strategically useful tack for Vance to take in the kind of jostling that Mike was just describing. It might be that people are now going to stake out their little corners and fiefdoms within post-Trump MAGA and try to make a case for their small issue set over and against the other things that people have been concerned about. But I don't think that's really a smart move, actually. All of this makes me feel I've been skeptical for a while. It makes me feel skeptical about Vance's ability to detach from the kind of hyper-online set that have helped elevate him and become a politician for... broad, middle-of-the-road coalition that obviously is going to be the one which wins the next election. I think you have to do a kind of... Was it Henry Olsen who talked about Vance as Prince Hal? I can't remember if it was him or somebody else, but this is this idea from Shakespeare that Henry V starts out his life kind of among the people with this little coterie of bros that he hangs out with, but then He says that he's going to be like unto the sun in that he will arise and shake all of that off and be more impressive because he was previously surrounded by clouds. I think Vance, in order to become a viable leader of a really successful movement, has to do a little bit of that. And for a while now, it's felt like he's not willing to. It's felt like he's sort of attached or wedded to the podcast class that Mike, you described a little bit too. I don't know if, like, I don't know the guy, so I don't know if he's actually sort of persuaded by this picture of things that he puts forward, that it's all about Iran and Israel, or whether he's just betting on the group of people that think that way to be his ticket into the White House. Either way, I don't think it's a very good look. Like, I'm... I'm kind of waiting and watching to see what becomes of Rubio in the wake of all this. Just because I don't know that Vance has really distinguished himself yet, and this tweet does not make me enthusiastic about him, I have to say. Do you guys have any hopes for this? Well, I think it's obvious, it should be obvious to everyone that it will be tough. As I'll just reiterate, tough for Rubio and Vance for reasons that are totally normal and don't need to be specifically linked even to Iran, just the fact that they presided over this. This now second Trump administration, which started its slide into unfavorability a few months out of the gate because of reasons of affordability and cost of living, which were exacerbated by maybe a much too broadly across the board tariff environment, which did not help domestic prices. And then to steel man the sort of Iran war side, I think that they're part of the argument There's an argument they're making and there's... It's plausible, and there's a certain truth to it, is that sort of drift downwards of approvability. started to become a slide with the Iran war in 2026. So the, the drift down in favorability through 25, you know, it was bad. It was, but it was manageable. And it looked like maybe if in Henry Olson makes this point in late fall 25, it looks like you're probably going to lose the house if things stay where they are in terms of presidential favorability and what that means for the popular vote across the country. And then you have the Iran war and that slides out of Out of any possibility of optimism about the midterms at all. Thank And I think the argument that they would make on top of that would be this turnout difference between the generic Democrat you environment and the generic Republican environment. And I think you would be foolish to say the Iran very war played no role in that at all. Republicans showed up like a semi-enthusiastic midterm much. and Democrats showed up almost like a presidential contest was at stake so that more of them showed up. So I think they would argue that there's this certain segment of Republican voters who were out in 24 who just declined to come out in 26. And the Iran war was a big piece of that. I think that's That's totally plausible. So it's all very messy. See, you know. You know, again, we shouldn't, it's tempting to overread the fine distinctions between percentages of what was crucial and what was a major component of why people voted. This is not a scientific enterprise. People, you know, have a basket of opinions they have, and they render a judgment on the party in power and the administration in power, and then they vote against it. It's too messy, really, to draw any monocausal explanation, Spencer. I think it's a matter of all of the above. And I think there's a segment of the right that wants to say, actually, if you parse this correctly, Iran war really didn't play much of a role at all. That's foolish and, I think, incorrect. Correct. So over-reading it on either side seems to me to be a fool's errand. And they all need to look positively at... The thing that the case they want to make for themselves going forward and that. As well, we'll be dependent upon the circumstances on the ground, which include now an emboldened new progressive caucus growing in number on the House side. I was struck this morning, Politico covered a couple of the events, especially the freshman congressman orientation for the Democrats, and then whatever they call it, the Obama podcast bros do a convention. Thank Crooked con or something like that. I forget what exactly what they called it. And the reporting out of both of those was enthusiasm riding high and also immediately a good section of the progressive part you of the party newly emboldened saying. very My constituents are telling me and I'm now telling reporters, we can't just hand this over to Hakeem Jeffries. Despite the facts on the ground, much. looking like Hakeem Jeffries is going to be the Speaker of the House, probably 90% likely, but they already have this brewing conflict internally and how they conduct themselves over the next two years will be a big part of the case made by Republican aspirants to the White House. So it's all. As always, politics is difficult. Prudence is hard. And the Republicans will have the harder argument just because of historical trends. And a couple now, a couple terms of a Republican president and an ascendant Democratic Party in the midterms, it means the environment will be more difficult for Republicans in 28, all else being held equal. We'll see how everyone Everyone adapts and how they try to. Uh, thread that needle. Yeah. One thing too, that we can even talk about just very briefly are, you know, uh, what does a lame duck Trump, you know, administration look like? Um, there are many people obviously talking about, you know, uh, we published Jason Kilmeyer, um, last week about, oh, this means we need to ramp up mass deportations in a huge way. We only have. I think it was 46 months. Jeff Clark has talked about on X, you know, we need to fill, Republicans need to fill every, you know, every federal judicial vacancy possible. The House Freedom Caucus came out and said they need to pass reconciliation package that looks at debt, spending, tax relief, codifying the president's border security policies, banning sanctuary cities. So there's... All kinds of things that are kind of being talked about right now. Um, John Solomon, just the news he was talking about with GOP lawmakers that have told him pass multi-year agency budgets for all key agencies put downward pressure on interest rates. It's... Whipsaw Democrats at the major effort to save Medicare and Social Security. So there's all kinds of things. Oh, another one that's really important for Republicans to block the Democrat state compact seeking to end the Electoral College. So they're all kind of proposals being made right now. One thing that I do think about, especially with some of these proposals, I mean, even something as, hey, what about if Justice Thomas and Justice Alito step down? John Thune actually mentioned that as a possibility about, hey, we can actually still have, you know, Supreme Court nomination hearings in this lame duck period before the Democrats take over, which is kind of striking coming from him. I'm surprised to even hear that. But this. This does kind of point to, I think, a much larger issue with the way that the Iran war has gone, with the way that the Trump administration, I think, has gone the past year plus. Nate Fisher brought this up on X, where you are constrained now in a big way from doing anything big in politics to take any kind of chance at all, just because voters, I think, especially in the Middle East, especially in foreign policy, have just, I think, had it with what they see as adventurism that does not do anything to benefit the American people. The benefits, the wrong people, the benefits, NGOs, the benefits, the lobbyist class. So I think that this is a huge, huge issue that I think Republicans are going to have to deal with, too, because obviously they see big things need to take place, need to take place soon just because they're going to be out of power soon in Congress and Trump administration before Christmas. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, this is so this is a this is a big thing, like Sherrod Brown, I think, Senator now, Senator elect from the state of Ohio. I think he's going to actually be seated December 15th, actually, I think, which is interesting. So Republicans need to really think about this, that the things that they've done, the things that that really haven't worked, I think, are really going to constrain them, you know, obviously, not only in the short term going forward before the new Congress is is sat, but. And certainly, even in 2028, I think, I can't remember who even said this specifically, I think this might have been Ron DeSantis pointed this out, where, look, Republicans are probably not going to have a real shot of retaking the Senate until 2032 now. So that is something where, look, the policies you make, the things you do, I mean, have... consequences, and especially for Republicans, grave consequences for many years to come. Yeah. Basically, we can just slide this conversation right on into our extra paid segment. Mike, because over at Claremont Digital Plus, I think we're going to talk about the ouster of Susie Wiles as chief of staff and the reconfiguration within the Trump administration, but also we can keep discussing, yeah, what does this... Like next couple years look like and how are we going to use the time that remains with Trump in office? I want to say, Ryan, you're right to bring up the opposite extreme from. kind of Iran war monocausality. So if it's kind of silly to be like, this is all about the war, it's also silly. And I have seen this floated that the war was really a non-factor or a secondary thing that distracted people from the other issues. I've not seen anyone make a persuasive argument in defense of that. And I think the question is more about, well, okay, the Iran war was obviously a major component in voters' discontent with Trump in the second term. Was it more on the order of something which exacerbated their core concerns? In other words, they were upset about inflation and cost of living and corruption and so on and so forth. And they felt that the war was like just throwing a big old, you know, douse of oil on that fire. Or was it separately something they disliked in its own right? Quoi, Ron? war. In other words, did they dislike its effect or did they dislike it as a policy? And this is something I think that that is an actual worthwhile discussion to be had. We don't have time to have it now, but maybe we'll come back to it next time. Thank you very much for listening to the American Mind podcast. This is all we have time for, but you should go over to theamericanmind.org and read the piece Mike mentioned by Jeff Anderson, one of the finest analysts of this sort of thing, I think, around, and he's one of our guys. So we're glad to have American Mind. You can also check out the Claremont Review of Books at claremontreviewofbooks.com. I believe my own essay on translation and politics is out from behind the paywall right now over there. So that can be fun. Plus a bunch of other things that we do on that site. And we've got our sister podcast, The Close Read, releasing new episodes where I interview authors from CRB and discuss their pieces. Just had a great conversation with Mike Anton, which I don't know if it's up yet as of you're listening to this, but you will be able to get it by subscribing to that wherever you get your podcasts. Check out our D.C. based center for the American way of life at D.C. dot Claremont dot org and donate to support us at Claremont dot org slash donate. We're always very grateful for any amount that you would like to kick our way to help keep the lights on. Thanks to our one man production and engineering crew, the Brother G. Ryan Gannon, thanks to you all for listening. We will talk to you next week.